Aug. 4, 1996: Scenic road still associated with murders

Daily Press

An emergency call box hangs on a pole near the Felgates Creek bridge. The box was installed after a disappearance in 1988 and a double murder in 1986 near the site.

Longtime Yorktown resident Jan Twyman, who often works in Williamsburg, will travel out of her way to avoid the Colonial Parkway after dark, and she has given her three children strict orders not to drive there at night.

Stephanie Reiss and Joanna Reading, archaeological graduate students at the College of William and Mary who have lived here only a year, have heard the stories that still circulate and are wary when they travel to their dig in Yorktown.

They and hundreds of others who can't help but think of stories of murder when they drive the scenic, pastoral parkway all share the same kind of trepidation: If the unthinkable happened to the others, could it happen to them?

A decade has passed since two women were found dead with their throats slashed on the Colonial Parkway, and eight years since the car of a still-missing young couple was discovered on the popular tourist drive that connects Yorktown and Williamsburg.

The 1986 deaths of Rebecca Dowski and Cathleen Thomas and the 1988 disappearance of Keith Call and Cassandra Hailey remain unsolved.

It's been years - and yet the specter of a killer stalks still on the Parkway.

Most men and women live through each day using basic assumptions on what to expect from the people around them, says Larry Ventis, a William and Mary clinical psychology professor who also has a part-time private practice. Those assumptions vary but usually include that most people are decent, he said.

At the same time, the one thing that unites all people is the daily, if mostly unconscious, denial that death can occur any day, any time, to anyone, he said.

A grisly murder, especially an unsolved one, both shatters people's basic assumptions about each other and violently brings to surface the knowledge that death will happen and could happen unexpectedly, Ventis said.

``That can be terribly disorienting,'' Ventis said.

The place where the grisly, unexpected death was discovered becomes a "reminder of not the area, but of our own vulnerability,'' Ventis said.

Dale Congrove, another Yorktown resident, knows the disorientation well. He and his family were camping in Shenandoah National Park in June, the same month the bodies of two women campers were found dead there, also with their throats slashed.

``After hearing about it, it made you wonder if it could happen to you,'' Congrove said.

Noting a number of similarities in the case, FBI officials last month said they are exploring whether the Shenandoah and Dowski-Thomas murders might be connected.

FBI, state and local law enforcement officials already believe a serial killer or killers are responsible for the disappearance of Call and Hailey, the murder of Dowski and Thomas, and the deaths of at least two other couples between 1986 and 1989.

In 1987 the bodies of David Knobling and Robin Edwards were found at Ragged Island Wildlife Refuge. In 1989, the bodies of Daniel Lauer and his brother's girlfriend, Annamaria Phelps, was found near the New Kent County westbound rest stop on Interstate 64.

Because of their proximity and similarity, the four cases have been dubbed the Parkway murders. But there is no evidence that any of the victims were initially accosted on the Parkway.

The cases all have baffled investigators. Particularly concerning is an apparent lack of any struggle in each incident, as if the dead and missing each met their fate without a fight. Some have speculated that perhaps the killer or killers posed as law enforcement officers.

That has led Twyman to instruct her children also not to stop on the Parkway even if pulled over by a law officer unless other people are around. Both Reading and Reiss expressed similar concerns.

Twyman understands her caution may be more reactionary than rational. The idea that an officer may be involved in the killings is likely ``without any founding,'' Twyman acknowledges with a shrug.